Iran's Business Class: The Story We Shouldn't Miss

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Shirin Golkar is the Secretary General at the Swiss MENA Chamber. We met when she was completing her Executive MBA at HEC Paris. She knows Iran’s business community not as an abstraction, but as a network of entrepreneurs. Many of them are women who spent years trying to scale businesses against the wall of sanctions, compliance regimes, and banks that wouldn’t pick up the phone.When I first reached out to her, Iran looked different. The war hadn’t started. The checkpoints weren’t up.By the time we recorded, massive casualties had been announced. People were evacuating from Tehran. The economy faced sixty percent inflation. Banks closed. Iran is a country, as Shirin puts it plainly, that is not working.And yet the conversation didn’t stop there. Because Shirin understands something most headlines don’t reach: that underneath the catastrophe, a society’s economic aspirations point stubbornly in one direction, even as its government pulls in another. Some people may want North Korea, she says. The Iranian people want South Korea.One question in particular stayed with me. When formal diplomatic channels collapse, can business fill the gap? Can trade be a form of conversation between countries that aren’t speaking? Shirin doesn’t have a straight answer. But she has a view, and it’s more grounded than most of what you’ll read today.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe